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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Your taste in music is shaped by the crowd

By Kurt Kleiner

People like a song more when they think other people like it too, a new study suggests. But the interactions between individual and group opinions are so complex that it is impossible to predict whether a good song will be a hit or a flop, according to researchers who asked people to rate the quality of music by unknown bands.

Sociologists Matthew Salganik and colleagues at Columbia University in New York, US, recruited more than 14,000 people to visit a website with 48 songs by relatively unknown bands. People could listen to songs, rate them, and then decide whether to download them.

One group of participants saw only the names of songs and musical groups. Other participants also saw how many times a particular song had been downloaded by others. Both groups broadly agreed about which songs were good and which were bad.

But participants who could see how often a song had been downloaded tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

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Different worlds

But a track with hit potential does not always become a hit, it seems. The researchers divided the socially influenced group (which could see the download information) into eight different “worlds”, so that only the downloading decisions within that world were visible.

They found that the same songs did not always make it to the top of the charts. For example in one world, a Milwaukee pop punk band called 52Metro were stars, reaching number 1 in the download charts. In another world they were losers, ranked 40 out of 48.

“From outside of the industry, it seems like music executives can create stars at will. But we only see the ones that become successful. We don’t see all the failures,” Salganik says.

Locked in

Final chart positions were not entirely random though. For example, all of the songs that were hits in the socially influenced groups were also rated as good by the group with no access to the download information. And the results did not reflect a simple “lock in” effect – i.e. a song that got an early lead did not necessarily maintain that lead. But beyond that, Salganik says, the dynamics are hard to understand.

“This is very exciting research,” says Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell University, Ithaca, US. “What they’re addressing is a puzzle – why is it so difficult to predict what will be a hit movie or a hit song?”

For hopeful start-up bands, the results mean good news and bad news, Salganik says&colon; “Even if you haven’t made it yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s low quality music – you could just be unlucky. But it also suggests that even if it’s high quality music, you might not become successful.”